Turn the World Upside Down

[Newer posts are at http://spritzler.blogspot.com/ and www.NewDemocracyWorld.org ]
On top, world elites are the thousands, imposing inequality and fomenting wars to control us. Under them, we are billions in resistance. Let us turn the world upside down.

Tuesday, December 06, 2011

Be a Good Republican and Support Occupy Wall Street

Are you one of the many good, decent hardworking Americans who are registered members of the Republican Party and who view the Occupy Wall Street folks very negatively? If so, I'm guessing you believe that the OWS protesters are freeloaders who expect others to pay for their own foolish decisions, and who begrudge the higher standard of living enjoyed by people who work harder and smarter than others. The reason you joined the Republican Party is no doubt because it opposes such freeloader thinking and champions the contrary view that people should take responsibility for their own lives and work to earn what they desire to possess.

I don't intend to argue with you about your values. In fact, I agree that freeloading is wrong and that people should take responsibility for their own lives and work to earn what they desire to possess. I merely want to say why someone with those values would want to support the OWS movement, and why Republican leaders who condemn OWS only pretend to share your values.

The OWS movement says that the growing economic inequality in America, and the huge power and wealth concentrated in the 1% of the very wealthy, especially bankers like Goldman Sachs, is wrong. Are they right or wrong? Well, if they are taking the side of freeloaders, then they are wrong. But if they are complaining about freeloaders getting away with it, then they are right. Which is it?

Are the real freeloaders in America the people in OWS, or people like the Goldman Sachs bankers? Financial analyst, Daniel Amerman aptly captures the essence of the immediate cause of the recent financial crisis as, "near criminal insanity of investment bankers writing themselves massive bonus checks for effectively standing in a circle and making promises to each other that none of them have ever had the capital to back up." [http://danielamerman.com/articles/2011/QuickEuroA.html] is what the bankers' trading in derivatives and credit default swaps (CDS) and all of the other arcane shenanigans was all about.

Financial analyst, Clive Maund, CFA, describes what the bankers did this way:

"[T]he hopeless economic mess that we find ourselves in today is the direct result of the ballooning of debt and derivatives over many years by opportunistic and irresponsible banks and other companies in the financial sector, with the support and collusion of cronies in government and throughout the business community, with the result that the debt and derivative mountains have grown to such monstrous proportions that they are bringing the world economy to a dead stop, verging on collapse. The banks and financial sector companies are on the hook for massive losses and after years of garnering huge profits from deals associated with this debt pyramiding, are now scrambling to push all of their snowballing bad debts onto the ordinary citizen. They have already succeeded in doing this in 2008 - 2009 in the US with their 'too big to fail' mantra and to put it crudely, the average US citizen has been well and truly shafted..." [http://www.clivemaund.com/gmu.php?art_id=68&date=2011-12-04]

By getting the government to bail them out of their bad debts, the bankers did what the OWS folks are accused of: "expect others to pay for their own foolish decisions." And boy did they! The combined Bush and Obama bailouts were estimated in July 2009 by Neil Barofsky, Special Inspector General of the Troubled Asset Relief Program, at $23.7 trillion dollars. The audacity of this mother of all freeloading is made even more evident by the fact that there was never any justification for it except the bankers' greed. As Dave Stratman writes,

"But weren’t these bailouts and the consequent austerity programs necessary? The answer is no. The gigantic bailouts were only necessary, explains John Hussman, President of Hussman Investment Trust, because Bernanke and Geithner and their backers in Congress chose to protect the bondholders of the “too big to fail” institutions rather than the public. The usual—and legally required—way of dealing with failed banks is to fire and replace their management, use their shareholders’ and bondholders’ capital to correct their balance sheet, and sell the bank's good debts to a solvent institution. This is the method used recently in the case of Washington Mutual, the largest bank failure in U.S. history, and hundreds of other cases. Neither depositors nor taxpayers lose a penny in this process. Hussman points out that the bonds backing the “TBTF” banks in question represent more than enough capital to restructure the bank balance sheets and discharge the toxic debt."

Republicans, of course, respect people who work harder and smarter and they do not begrudge such people the fruits of their honest labor, even if those fruits are very substantial indeed. But the bankers taking home their multimillion dollar bonuses were not doing honest work. I don't think good Republicans like yourself have in mind con artists and swindlers when they speak of working harder and smarter, do they? There is no justification for these bankers living in extreme luxury enjoying a life style ordinary working people can only dream of. They did not deserve to receive the bonuses and bailouts. This is why they are rightly called freeloaders.

But what about the OWS folks who are complaining about having mortgages greater than the value of their home, or about having their home repossessed by the bank? What about the OWS youngsters complaining about having crippling debts of sixty thousand dollars or more as the price of a college education in a society that does not offer them a decent-paying job? Does their wanting some relief from these debts make them freeloaders too? Well, as in the case of the bankers, the answer to this question depends on whether they deserve to have what they are asking for.

Do working class people who work 40 hours a week and often more to produce the wealth of our society deserve to have decent homes to live in? Do students who study at a college and earn good grades and graduate with a degree in order to be better educated and better able to contribute to our society deserve to receive such an education without having to go deep into debt? Do people who contribute their fair share towards producing the wealth that, as a complex society, we produce together, deserve to enjoy the benefits of what they help produce?

Republicans support the military, so let's answer the above questions by considering how they are addressed inside our military forces. Soldiers are expected to do various things, including learn new skills. But when they do what is expected, they are not required to go deep into debt to pay for their housing and education. Why should this same principle not apply to civilians? The principle is, "From each according to ability, to each according to need." This idea comes from the Bible. "Neither was there any among them that lacked: for as many were possessors of lands or houses sold them, and brought the prices of the things that were sold, And laid them down at the apostle's feet: and distribution was made unto every man according as he had need" (Acts, 4:43-35). It is an anti-freeloading principle because it requires "from each according to ability." This is a very reasonable and just principle. The OWS folks are simply asking that it be applied to everybody.

What about the idea that people should take responsibility for their own lives? We've seen how the bankers, on the contrary, have demanded that the public take responsibility for their lives by paying for their undeserved lives of extreme luxury, but what about the OWS folks? There is nothing about the concept, "taking responsibility for one's own life," that excludes cooperating with others to do it, is there? When people join together to right the wrongs of society, isn't that a valid way of "taking responsibility for one's own life"? When people form an army to take responsibility for making their own lives secure against an enemy threat, aren't they "taking responsibility for their own lives?" The OWS folks have joined together to right some terrible wrongs in our society. They have succeeded in placing the wrongfulness of growing economic inequality and concentrated power in the hands of bankers and the very rich on the public agenda, something that nobody before them came even close to accomplishing. If this isn't an example of "taking responsibility for one's own life" then what, pray tell, is?

In all of the above I have been addressing the concerns of good Republicans, by which I mean Republicans who take seriously the values that the Republican Party claims to champion. But there are bad Republicans too. These are Republicans who only pretend to champion the Party's stated values. Bad Republicans are in the leadership of the GOP. The reason they condemn the OWS movement is not because it goes against the values of good Republicans, but because it exemplifies them. Bad Republicans actually support freeloading when it is done by the very rich. I urge you, because you are a good Republican, to support the Occupy Wall Street movement. I also urge you to read "Thinking about Revolution" and ask yourself if the values it espouses are not really much closer to your values than those of the richest 1% whom your GOP leaders support.

Sunday, November 27, 2011

Egyptians Beware: Elections Are a Trap

President Obama wants elections and a civilian government in Egypt. Egyptians! Please don't fall for this trap.

Elections are a trap that ruling elites use to prevent people from making the world more equal and democratic. This is why agents of the American plutocracy, from Jimmy Carter to George W. Bush to Barack Obama, always insist that wherever overtly undemocratic regimes (like monarchies or military rulers or Presidents-for-life) are unable to control their populations, then there should be elections of a national government. From the United States itself to Iraq and Haiti and now Egypt, this is the plutocracy's game plan for social control, to make class inequality secure against popular movements.

The trap works like this. The elections produce a national government that, based on the electoral victory of its politicians, claims to be the representative of the people with, therefore, legitimate authority to rule over the people. The government then makes and enforces laws that reflect the values and interests not of ordinary people but of the very wealthy. The people are trapped, because they feel that the elected government is exercising legitimate power that they have no right to challenge.

The leaders of the upper class do not allow elections to take place until they are confident that they can control the outcome sufficiently to ensure that the trap functions properly. They gain this control by their ownership or control of the important institutions in society: the large businesses that control people with the threat of firing them, the mass media, and often the labor organizations and religious organizations.

It is a mistake to believe that the important distinction is between a government of military generals versus an elected civilian government. Both are equally capable of being used by a privileged, wealthy elite as an instrument of class domination. The important distinction is between a government that is an instrument of ordinary people for abolishing class inequality and creating a non-capitalist economy based on "from each according to ability and to each according to need," versus a government that is an instrument of an upper class for making socially-produced wealth the exclusive property of a few and suppressing popular efforts to make society more equal.

Governments that are instruments of a wealthy elite, that have objectives that most people oppose, need to exert power over people; they therefore need to be centralized national governments that claim the right to command the people to obey its laws. When they hold elections in order to be able to get away with this, they are fake democracies.

In contrast, when ordinary people are shaping society by widely shared values of equality and mutual aid, they need no such authoritarian top-down government. What they need, instead, is a way to democratically cooperate with each other on a large scale in order to achieve social order. The kind of government that does this, and which is truly democratic, is one based on voluntary federation of local community and workplace assemblies that have the exclusive power to make and enforce laws--laws passed by local meetings in which every adult who opposes class inequality and who will be bound by such laws is free to participate as an equal with all others. (See further discussion of this in Thinking about Revolution.)

Democracy is a crucial goal today. But elections do not a democracy make. Elections in societies based on class domination are a trap. When Jimmy Carter or some UN committee arrives to inspect the elections and give them a "Seal of Approval," beware! It's a trap.

Real democracy requires the disbanding of all the institutions that the upper class uses to control and dominate people, especially the military and the police forces. Merely having a constitution that says the military has limited power and is subservient to the civilian government is not enough. If an instrument capable of dominating the people exists, the privileged elite will use it or threaten to use it to maintain their privileged status, no matter what a constitution may say. The revolutionary movement must persuade the rank and file soldiers to come over to the side of the revolution and refuse to obey orders from the military top command, which means the military as an institution must be destroyed. To accomplish this, the revolution must make its goal of abolishing class inequality crystal clear, because this is the goal that will inspire working class soldiers to support it, even at great risk to themselves.

Monday, October 31, 2011

From Occupation to Revolution II

If OWS decides explicitly that its goal is revolution, it would transform the OWS movement. It would be a qualitative leap and set the agenda for the coming years: a national and international conversation about how to make a revolution and what a post-revolutionary society can be like. If OWS does this, then folding the tents in the heart of winter (or losing them to a police raid) won't matter because the revolutionary strategy can be carried out even without them. What OWS will gain is what does matter: a whole new level of consciousness, determination, and ties to the community and each other internationally.

But what exactly does it mean to make revolution our goal? How is that different from what OWS is already doing? Does it mean picking up a gun or smashing more windows or attacking the police? No it does not. It means doing what is discussed below.

One of the most popular chants of the Occupy Wall Street occupations is, "The banks got bailed out; we got sold out." People want a more equal and democratic society and they know that the 1% with the real power in our country want the opposite. How can the OWS occupiers make society more equal and democratic?

On this, opinions vary widely. While everybody wants more people to join and support the occupation, there is presently little agreement about what "joining and supporting the occupation" should mean in practice. What, exactly, do occupiers need to do in order to achieve a more equal and democratic society?

Some believe that if occupiers keep their tents at the various parks around the country long enough, then the desired changes will happen. Others believe that if enough people get themselves arrested in civil disobedience actions to demonstrate the sincerity of our convictions, that will exert "moral suasion" (as Gandhi called it) on the rulers and make them change their ways. Some think that if everybody can agree on a few realistic demands and communicate them clearly, that will do it. And some believe that electing different politicians to office will solve our problems.

None of the above actions, however, will achieve the desired goal, because these actions don't remove from power the plutocracy that holds the real power in America and that wants America to be undemocratic and unequal, and these actions don't abolish the capitalist system from which the plutocracy derives its power based on concentrated wealth.

Tents in parks won't stop a ruling class that commands the greatest military force on the planet.

The plutocracy already knows we are sincere, and they don't care if we offer ourselves to be arrested to make the point.

Any "realistic" demands we make will have to avoid challenging the power of the plutocracy or the capitalist system from which it derives its power, or the demands will be dismissed as "unrealistic." Defining our goal as a set of "realistic" demands means declaring that we will stop bothering the plutocracy when it makes the demanded changes. Our movement will then be over; the plutocracy will remain in power, able to take back whatever it gave; and before long we'll be back where we are today.

The plutocracy was never elected, and cannot be un-elected. Politicians in our society only have the power that the plutocracy delegates to them; they most certainly do not have the power to remove the plutocracy from power.

It will take a revolution to remove the plutocracy from power, and to begin creating a new kind of society based on equality and mutual aid and genuine democracy. The strategy and tactics of the OWS movement should be directed towards building a huge, popular revolutionary movement, one that explicitly aims to remove the plutocracy from power, that has a vision of a new and better kind of society that can inspire hundreds of millions of Americans to fight for it. This kind of movement can win the support of soldiers and sailors so that, when the ruling class orders the military to attack the revolution, they will disobey and instead join and help defend the revolution with their weapons. This is how a revolutionary movement, when it reaches critical mass, will be able to prevail even in a contest of violent force with the ruling class.

The world does not have to be a capitalist one, based on class inequality and the glorification of self-interest. Most people want a very different kind of society. We can create a society that is the way most people want it to be, in which products and services are created to satisfy real needs and reasonable desires consistent with sustainability and environmental wisdom, not to make a profit for the few at the expense of every other consideration; in which the economy is based on sharing, from each according to ability and to each according to need, where products and services are provided according to need, not according to who has enough money to buy them; where there are no rich and poor because everybody has an equal right to enjoy the benefits of the wealth that society produces.

We can create a genuine democracy in which all law-making power resides in local community and workplace assemblies that all adults who support the principles of equality and mutual aid can attend. Instead of social order on a large scale being imposed by a centralized government democratic in name only, it can be achieved in a truly democratic manner by voluntary federation of local assemblies. (This is discussed in some detail in "Thinking about Revolution.")

The key to building this revolutionary movement is to first explicitly declare that building a revolutionary movement is the strategic goal. Then tactics can be evaluated with respect to how well they serve that goal. The chief element of the strategy is spreading the revolutionary ideas--that the ruling class has no legitimate right to rule over us, that revolution is necessary, that it is possible, and that it is the way to create a far better society based on equality and mutual aid and democracy. Tactics would emphasize communicating these ideas to the wider public: chants during demonstrations, leaflets passed out wherever the public is, talks by us where people live and work, teach-ins, interviews given to whatever media will do them. And tactics would include various creative ways to involve the public in actively discussing and developing revolutionary ideas, and recruiting others to help spread the message.

What about confrontational actions? These tactics also should be evaluated the same way. Do they spread the revolutionary message? Sometimes a confrontation with authority can indeed bring wider attention to our revolutionary message. But this depends on how we engage in the confrontation. A confrontation that exposes the illegitimacy and immorality of the rulers, for example when people pack a courtroom to protest eviction proceedings against a family, is good. A confrontation that gives the rulers what the public will perceive as a legitimate reason for using police force against our movement is bad. Confronting the police, in and of itself, does not help, and can backfire if it enables the rulers to paint a false picture of us in the public eye.

What about violence? Violence in self-defense may not be tactically wise in a given situation, but it is not immoral. The philosophy of nonviolence is wrong to say it is. Violence against property, when it is not clearly in self-defense, serves no good purpose and makes it easy for the rulers to turn the public against us. Violence against unarmed civilians has nothing to do with self-defense, and it is immoral.

If we focus on spreading the revolutionary message, then there will come a time when the revolutionary movement is large enough and has the support of sufficient numbers of soldiers and sailors to successfully defend itself against violence by the forces remaining loyal to the ruling class. At this time we should use whatever force, including violence, that is necessary to defend ourselves and the goals of the revolution.

But we are not yet at the point when we can actually prevail in a contest of violent force with the ruling class. Therefore it makes no sense to pretend that we are and to deliberately get into violent fights with the police that we have no way of winning. When the police attack us violently, we should do our best to make an orderly tactical retreat. Our strategic offense is what is most important: to spread a message about what we believe and what we want. The message isn't that we can defeat the well-armed police today; it is that the movement we are building is for values and objectives that most people share, and it can grow large enough one day to win a contest of force with the ruling class.

We need to keep our eye on the revolutionary strategy. Let us not get deflected from it by wishful thinking of the sort that says that "moral suasion" or "enough tents" or "better politicians" or "reasonable demands" will make the rulers change their ways.

Let us neither be deflected from the revolutionary strategy by those who propose tactics that have nothing to do with spreading revolutionary ideas. There is a totally false Hollywood image of what it means to be a revolutionary, made up of images of Che Guevara and black-shirted bomb-throwing (or window-breaking) "anarchists" who strike a revolutionary pose and talk tough with bravado. Police provocateurs, agents of the ruling class, try to get us to act this way, or themselves act this way in our name, because they know that as long as we equate our movement with such actions we will not be thinking about how to spread revolutionary ideas and mobilizing the public around those ideas, and the public will be turned against us.

The rulers have many agents with many different disguises, all pretending to be our friends, trying to persuade us what to do. They can be very persistent--that is their job! They appeal to our wishful thinking, or our desire to view ourselves as courageous, or anything else that will work, as long as it prevents us from understanding what a real revolutionary strategy is, and carrying it out. Now, more than ever, we need to think carefully about strategy and tactics. Just doing what seems to be "in the air" or whatever the most persistent individuals advocate is not good enough to win. It will take a huge revolutionary movement to win, which can develop if, and only if, we aim to make it happen.

We should make every Occupation a base camp for spreading the idea of revolution. Occupations should actively reach out to the larger community, as Occupy Boston did recently when it cooperated with Occupy the Hood and local people to stage a large rally in Dudley Square in Roxbury, the heart of the black community. The rally focused on local concerns, especially police brutality, but put them in the larger picture of savage inequality in American society.

Wednesday, October 19, 2011

Occupiers: Let this be our Message to the American People

The 1% with all the money, and their Republican and Democratic politicians controlled by money, do not represent the 99%, do not serve the 99%, and do not have any legitimate right to govern the 99%.

To soldiers, sailors and members of police forces, we say: Do not obey orders from the 1%, to attack the movement of the 99%. Our movement aims to create a fundamentally more equal and democratic society. If you obey such orders you will be taking the side of the dictatorship of the rich and attacking your own people. Refuse such orders. Come over to the side of the people--your neighbors and friends and relatives.

To the American people, we say: Once again it is time for revolution in America. Instead of a British king we have a ruling class of bankers and billionaires who control the government and all the important institutions of society. The powerful men and women who run our world were not elected and cannot be unelected. They can only be removed from power by revolution.

Our goal is democratic revolution, to break the power of the ruling elite and create a society run by and for the people: a true democracy, with a non-capitalist economy in which all who contribute to it share equally in its benefits.

Join us. Show your support with signs saying "Equality" in your windows and in any other way you can think of. Help to spread these ideas far and wide. We are the 99%. We can make a new world.

Tuesday, October 11, 2011

Occupiers: When the Cops Say Clear Out, What Should We Do?

This is a tactical question that can only be answered by first identifying the strategy we want to advance with our tactics. So let me start by talking about strategy.

Somebody in the Boston Occupation made a great sign: "The beginning is near!" Yes, the Occupation is a terrific beginning. But the beginning of what?

I hope it is the beginning of carrying out a strategy that can win. The strategy is to build a revolutionary movement that grows to include the great majority of Americans, including most soldiers and sailors who will refuse orders to attack it. Such a movement will inspire the 99% with a vision of a non-capitalist society based on equality and concern for one another and genuine democracy instead of the opposite values held by the 1%. Such a mass, popular revolutionary movement, if we build it, will be able to defend itself against all of the violence that the ruling class will try to use to stop it from making a new and better world.

Most occupiers know, however, that we are not there yet. We may be speaking for the values and the interests of the 99% but not all of the 99% fully understand that yet, and they are not all on board yet.

The nature of the verbal and written attacks on the Occupation indicate how far we've come and how far we still need to go to get the majority of Americans on board. When the Occupation first stared out small, the attack on us by the talking heads and mainstream news media consisted of ignoring us. It is a sign of our growth and increasing respect by the public that the media now feel the need to acknowledge our existence. The two main attack themes that I've noticed are the following:

"If they're against Wall Street then they're against capitalism!"

"They're just a bunch of spoiled college kids."

These themes are directed at our current weaknesses, and they should alert us to the need to strengthen ourselves where we are weakest.

Regarding the first one, we are indeed against Wall Street because we are against class inequality, which is what capitalism produces and depends upon. So yes, we are against capitalism. We want a society based on equality, not a capitalist one based on class inequality. We want a society based on democracy, not a capitalist one in which money is power and most don't have any. And we want a society based on people helping each other, not a capitalist one based on pitting people against each other in a competitive race to the bottom.

But the public has virtually never heard capitalism denounced in the name of the values that the public already embraces: equality and mutual aid and democracy. They have only heard it denounced by Communists who are notoriously anti-democratic and famous for creating societies in which "some are more equal than others." And the public is always told that without capitalism we would not have smart phones or anything else ever created during the last several hundred years of capitalism, as if human creativity only exists when there is class inequality. When it comes to engaging the public in this vital discussion, the beginning is near, but only the beginning.

Regarding the second attack, the "spoiled college kids" theme, this will remain our weakness until we have recruited many many Americans who are not college students. We can do this. But we are only beginning.

One way we'll know that we've got enough Americans--a critical mass--on board with us to really start thinking about making a revolution is this. We'll know we're nearly there when the kind of people who today accuse us of being against capitalism start saying something like, "Hey, I'm against capitalism too. Who isn't? But those crazy extremists are going about it the wrong way. They should work within the legal system to make changes, bla bla bla." We're not there yet. We're only at the beginning.

So what will we do when the police, as is very likely at some point in the near future, order everybody to leave the parks that the occupiers are occupying?

It would be a big mistake if, when this happens, we forget what our long term task is--to spread our ideas to more and more of the public and recruit more and more people to joining in that effort. If we mistakenly think that our most important task is to maintain control of the parks where we've been camping, then our movement will suffer greatly.

The police at this time have the ability to win a contest of force--violent force--with us. We should not make it our purpose today to try to win a fight with the police. At the present time, the beginning of our movement, that would be futile. When we have grown the revolutionary movement to critical mass it will not be futile, but very possible. If we delude ourselves into thinking that we can overpower the police today, then the result will be a huge defeat and a terrible demoralization of the movement. The rulers will succeed in sending their most important message to the American public: "Resistance is futile. The numbers who want a different kind of world are and always will be too small to succeed. We have the power. You don't."

If, on the other hand, we make an orderly TACTICAL retreat when it becomes necessary, and continue to take the STRATEGIC offensive by reaching out to the public with our revolutionary ideas, using all the ways we can invent, then we will continue to grow stronger.

Monday, October 10, 2011

What is the Occupation the Beginning of?

Somebody in the Boston Occupation made a great sign: "The beginning is near!" Yes, the Occupation is a terrific beginning. But the beginning of what?

I hope it is the beginning of a concerted effort to build a revolutionary movement that grows to include the great majority of Americans, including most soldiers and sailors who will refuse orders to attack it. I hope it inspires the 99% with a vision of a non-capitalist society based on equality and concern for one another and genuine democracy instead of the opposite values held by the 1%. And I know that such a mass, popular revolutionary movement, if we build it, will be able to defend itself against all of the violence that the ruling class will try to use to stop it from making a new and better world.

I also know, and I think most occupiers know, that we are not there yet. We may be speaking for the values and the interests of the 99% but not all of the 99% fully understand that yet, and they are not all on board yet.

The nature of the verbal and written attacks on the Occupation indicate how far we've come and how far we still need to go to get the majority of Americans on board. When the Occupation first stared out small, the attack on us by the talking heads and mainstream news media consisted of ignoring us. It is a sign of our growth and increasing respect by the public that the media now feel the need to acknowledge our existence. The two main attack themes that I've noticed are the following:

"If they're against Wall Street then they're against capitalism!"

"They're just a bunch of spoiled college kids."

These themes are directed at our current weaknesses, and they should alert us to the need to strengthen ourselves where we are weakest.

Regarding the first one, we are indeed against Wall Street because we are against class inequality, which is what capitalism produces and depends upon. So yes, we are against capitalism. We want a society based on equality, not a capitalist one based on class inequality. We want a society based on democracy, not a capitalist one in which money is power and most don't have any. And we want a society based on people helping each other, not a capitalist one based on pitting people against each other in a competitive race to the bottom.

But the public has virtually never heard capitalism denounced in the name of the values that the public already embraces: equality and mutual aid and democracy. They have only heard it denounced by Communists who are notoriously anti-democratic and famous for creating societies in which "some are more equal than others." And the public is always told that without capitalism we would not have smart phones or anything else ever created during the last several hundred years of capitalism, as if human creativity only exists when there is class inequality. When it comes to engaging the public in this vital discussion, the beginning is near, but only the beginning.

Regarding the second attack, the "spoiled college kids" theme, this will remain our weakness until we have recruited many many Americans who are not college students. We can do this. But we are only beginning.

One way we'll know that we've got enough Americans--a critical mass--on board with us to really start thinking about making a revolution is this. We'll know we're nearly there when the kind of people who today accuse us of being against capitalism start saying something like, "Hey, I'm against capitalism too. Who isn't? But those crazy extremists are going about it the wrong way. They should work within the legal system to make changes, bla bla bla." We're not there yet. We're only at the beginning.

So what will we do when the police, as is very likely at some point in the near future, order everybody to leave the parks that the occupiers are occupying?

It would be a big mistake if, when this happens, we forget what our long term task is--to spread our ideas to more and more of the public and recruit more and more people to joining in that effort. If we mistakenly think that our most important task is to maintain control of the parks where we've been camping, then our movement will suffer greatly.

The police at this time have the ability to win a contest of force--violent force--with us. We should not make it our purpose today to try to win a fight with the police. At the present time, the beginning of our movement, that would be futile. When we have grown the revolutionary movement to critical mass it will not be futile, but very possible. If we delude ourselves into thinking that we can overpower the police today, then the result will be a huge defeat and a terrible demoralization of the movement. The rulers will succeed in sending their most important message to the American public: "Resistance is futile. The numbers who want a different kind of world are and always will be too small to succeed. We have the power. You don't."

If, on the other hand, we make an orderly TACTICAL retreat when it becomes necessary, and continue to take the STRATEGIC offensive by reaching out to the public with our revolutionary ideas, using all the ways we can invent, then we will continue to grow stronger.

Wednesday, October 05, 2011

Race and the Occupation

The Occupation movement spreading across America is inviting the 99% to join together to defeat the power of the 1% and to make a better world. They envision a world without inequality, which would mean (as many are coming to see) without the capitalist system that is based upon, and promotes, inequality.

In the General Assemblies there are discussions of race, and how that relates to the movement for a better world. In this discussion I believe it is important to keep two facts in mind.

#1. In American society life is harder, on average, for working class blacks and Hispanics than for working class whites.

#2. In American society life is hard and getting harder for all working class people, regardless of race.

Some people focus on fact #1 and say that whites are privileged. Some on the Left, for example, talk about "White skin privilege." But "privilege" is the wrong word. The reason is this. The ruling class uses racial discrimination not to improve the lives of whites, which is what "privilege" implies, but to weaken the working class with divide-and-rule in order to more effectively oppress and exploit all working people, including whites--fact #2.

It doesn't make sense to refer to this racial discrimination as a "privilege" for the whites when it is being used to oppress and exploit whites as well as non-whites. Using the word "privilege" obscures the role of racial discrimination as an instrument for oppressing all races.

Furthermore, using the word "privilege" and the phrase "white skin privilege" tends, naturally, to promote among whites the wrong emotional response. We want all working class people, including whites, to feel righteous anger, not guilt: anger at the ruling class, not guilt from seeing themselves as unfairly "privileged." Angry people overthrow their oppressors. People who think they are guilty of enjoying privileges given to them by the ruling class don't.

In fact, we want whites to feel anger at the ruling class for using racial discrimination to divide-and-rule working class people. This is how racial unity against racial discrimination and ruling class oppression is built.

Please, let's drop the "white privilege" vocabulary. Let's talk about racial discrimination as a ruling class weapon that hurts us all. Let's reach out to people of all races on the basis of fighting our common enemy for shared goals, for equality. We will be a lot stronger if we do this.

The ruling class's purpose in using racial discrimination is to foment distrust between people of different races. Decades of slavery followed by Jim Crow followed by much higher than average unemployment and exclusion from higher-status jobs and positions in society and disproportionately greater imprisonment of black people was intended to make white people view blacks as intellectually and morally inferior to whites. It was also intended to make black people view whites, whether rich or poor, as the oppressor of blacks. It is an unfortunate fact that the ruling class has had some success with its divide and rule strategy: what people of different races think about each other, unconsciously if not consciously, has been negatively affected by decades of living in a society shaped by a ruling class determined to foment distrust between different races. Given this effort by the ruling class to divide and rule, what is significant about race in the U.S. today is not that there exists some distrust between the races, but that so many people nonetheless try so hard to build trusting relations of solidarity between the races.

The existing negative ideas and attitudes about race, however, do need to be identified and refuted, especially when they affect how we behave towards each other. To succeed in building a movement that can defeat the ruling class and create a better world, we need to keep in mind that good people can have bad ideas, that criticizing a person's bad idea or attitude about race is different from denouncing the person as a bad person as if they were trying, like the ruling class, to oppress people. We need to practice friendly criticism among ourselves, to root out the ideas and practices that the ruling class encourages among us to weaken us all.

Why We Have No Demands

Some people commenting on the Occupation movement sweeping America are saying that the movement needs to come up with specific demands. But this would be a big mistake.

It is a strength, not a weakness, that we are not making demands. We need a revolution. We all surely know that, don’t we? We need to remove the ruling class--the 1%, the plutocracy, the corporate elite, whatever one calls them—from power. We do not want this ruling class to do anything except to stop ruling. By making a demand on the ruling class, we would be saying to them that we want you to continue ruling, but to just make this or that reform in how you rule. Wrong!

Demands are messages to the rulers. We need, on the contrary, to direct our message to the ruled.

Our message is: Revolt against the rulers, remove them from power, abolish the capitalist system that is the basis of their power, and create a genuine democracy based on equality and mutual aid.

Monday, October 03, 2011

Leaders

The Occupy Wall Street (and Boston etc.) protestors say, "We have no leaders." This is true in one sense, but false in others. To see why, we need to consider the very different roles that people can play, all of which get lumped together, confusingly, under the term, "leader."

Sometimes a person who has a cult following is called a "leader" and in this sense the Occupy folks apparently do not have a leader. Good! Sometimes when people elect a president, prime minister, chairman or some similarly titled person, that person is called a "leader." The occupiers don't have one of those either.

But the occupiers do have people who provide leadership of different sorts. One important kind of leadership is helping people to develop clarity in their thinking about the situation. Such a leader would help people gain clarity in seeing that the conflict is between the positive values--equality, solidarity, democracy--shared by the rank-and-file versus opposite values--inequality, competition, top-down control--held by the elite enemy. This kind of leadership aims at giving the rank-and-file greater confidence in themselves as the source of what is good in the world and the source of what can make a better world. Such leadership can come from different people at different times; whenever anybody speaks at a meeting and contributes to this clarity, they are--at that moment at least--a leader.

Another kind of leader is a person whose role is that of a commander. "Commander" is not a derogatory word. There are times when it is very important to have a commander, or even a military-style hierarchy of commanders. Commanders are necessary when the rank-and-file need to make tactical decisions, as a group, too quickly for consensus methods to work, or in a situation when it is impractical to use a consensus method of decision-making. For example, when the "occupy" protestors are assembled in a marching column and marching through the streets, it is not possible to use consensus methods to make decisions about whether, when confronted with an unexpected fork in the road, to take the left or the right road.

Apparently this situation arose when the Wall Street Occupation march was crossing the Brooklyn Bridge and the cops in front of the march directed it to turn off the pedestrian walk and onto the main road for vehicles, as part of a trap to provide a pretext for arresting more than 700 protestors. The protestors who happened (by chance alone?) to be at the front of the march were confronted with a decision: follow the direction of the cops, or refuse to leave the pedestrian walkway. The people at the head of the march may not even have been aware of the fact, but at that moment they were commanders. Their choice determined where everybody behind them would march.

No doubt due to innocent lack of experience, these chance commanders made a poor decision, allowing the police trap to succeed. The moral of the story is that, in advance of situations like this when it is appropriate, the movement needs to democratically choose individuals with sound judgement to be its commanders. These commanders should be obeyed in the specific context for which they are selected; but otherwise they should be treated as just equal rank-and-file members of the movement.

Another role that is sometimes referred to as leadership is the role of facilitator of a large meeting using consensus methods. This is an important role. When individuals take the initiative to play this role well, that is a good thing, even if they do not happen to be selected by a formal democratic procedure. If the individuals acting as a facilitator do a poor job, then the rank-and-file need to step in and replace them with better facilitators.

The experience of movements from earlier decades is sometimes expressed this way: "When people say, 'We have no leaders,' it really means that there are leaders, but they operate in the shadows without transparency and accountability." There is much wisdom in these words. Instead of saying, "We have no leaders," it would be better to say, "We have many different kinds of leaders. Whoever provides clarity is a leader when they do that. We democratically select our commanders if and when we need them. We have good facilitators. Those are our leaders."

Tuesday, August 16, 2011

The People As Enemy: The Leaders' Hidden Agenda in World War II

The People as Enemy: The Leaders' Hidden Agenda in World War Two exposes how Allied leaders in WWII were not trying to liberate people from Fascism but rather to strengthen the corporate elite's control over their own increasingly revolutionary domestic working classes.

The book is available at Amazon.com or directly from myself at the reduced price of $3.00 plus $4.50 shipping and handling in the U.S. To purchase directly, email me at spritzler@comcast.net and use Pay Pal:

Friday, August 12, 2011

The British ruling class foments and then uses the "riots"

It is clear from a host of reports online that the key cause of the recent rioting in England is that the rioters—some of the poorest people in England--are furious at how the police have been tormenting them prior to the rioting, and how the rulers of England have deprived them of jobs and the chance to enjoy the wealth that society produces. This is not a race thing, it is a class thing. (“Members of the Jewish community have joined the fray, with members of Tottenham’s Hassidic community reportedly gathered in the street on Saturday to heckle police.”)

British police harass non-whites worse than whites, just as the American police do. By saying that “this is not a race thing, it is a class thing” I mean that the fundamental conflict is class and not race, that the upper ruling class—not the “white race”—is the problem, and that racial discrimination is, itself, a divide-and-rule instrument used by the upper class to try to create racial resentments and turn working class people against each other along race or ethnic lines. This is how one insightful person explains the violence:

“Violence is rarely mindless. The politics of a burning building, a smashed-in shop or a young man shot by police may be obscured even to those who lit the rags or fired the gun, but the politics are there. Unquestionably there is far, far more to these riots than the death of Mark Duggan, whose shooting sparked off the unrest on Saturday, when two police cars were set alight after a five-hour vigil at Tottenham police station. A peaceful protest over the death of a man at police hands, in a community where locals have been given every reason to mistrust the forces of law and order, is one sort of political statement. Raiding shops for technology and trainers that cost ten times as much as the benefits you’re no longer entitled to is another. A co-ordinated, viral wave of civil unrest across the poorest boroughs of Britain, with young people coming from across the capital and the country to battle the police, is another.

“Months of conjecture will follow these riots. Already, the internet is teeming with racist vitriol and wild speculation. The truth is that very few people know why this is happening. They don’t know, because they were not watching these communities. Nobody has been watching Tottenham since the television cameras drifted away after the Broadwater Farm riots of 1985. Most of the people who will be writing, speaking and pontificating about the disorder this weekend have absolutely no idea what it is like to grow up in a community where there are no jobs, no space to live or move, and the police are on the streets stopping-and-searching you as you come home from school. The people who do will be waking up this week in the sure and certain knowledge that after decades of being ignored and marginalised and harassed by the police, after months of seeing any conceivable hope of a better future confiscated, they are finally on the news. In one NBC report, a young man in Tottenham was asked if rioting really achieved anything:

“’Yes,’ said the young man. ‘You wouldn't be talking to me now if we didn't riot, would you?’; "’Two months ago we marched to Scotland Yard, more than 2,000 of us, all blacks, and it was peaceful and calm and you know what? Not a word in the press. Last night a bit of rioting and looting and look around you.’"

The British ruling class surely knew that inflicting police stop-and-search abusively on people whom they also deprived of jobs and hope for a decent life would eventually cause the victims to strike back in anger. Now we can see why the ruling class did this. They want to use the riots to frighten the rest of the British public into accepting the transformation of the U.K. into even more of a police state than it already is with surveillance cameras presently everywhere. The idea is to make most of the public feel that they need the ruling class to protect them from the poorest people. Here’s how Prime Minister Cameron is doing it:

“Mr Cameron said: ‘To the law abiding people who play by the rules, and who are the overwhelming majority in our country, I say: the fightback has begun, we will protect you. If you've had your livelihood and property damaged, we will compensate you. And to the lawless minority, the criminals who have taken what they can get, I say this: we will track you down... we will punish you. You will pay for what you have done.’”
Also reported: “Ministers and the security services are planning draconian powers to shut down or disrupt mobile phone messaging services and social networks in times of civil disorder.”

What the British ruling class is doing here is the same as what the Israeli ruling class of billionaires and generals is doing to control Israeli Jews—attacking non-Jews to foment anger and their striking back in order to make Jews so fearful of non-Jews that they will feel they need the Israeli ruling class to protect them. And it is the same as what the American ruling class is doing to control Americans—attacking foreign people so viciously, most recently murdering Afghani and Pakistani civilians, that they strike back in anger, thus making Americans so afraid of “terrorists” that we will look for protection from the likes of our Nobel Peace Prize-winning War-mongerer in Chief and his Wall Street cronies enriching themselves to the tune of multiple trillions of dollars at the expense of all the rest of us.

Monday, August 01, 2011

Reform Congress?

Americans neither like nor trust Congress. A survey by ABC NewsWashington Post, May 19-23, 1989 found that 79% of Americans agreed that "most members of Congress will tell lies if they feel the truth will hurt them politically," 75% agreed that they "care more about special interests than they care about people like [themselves]", 71% that they "make campaign promises they have no intention of fulfilling," 66% that they "care more about keeping power than they do about the best interests of the nation" and 57% that they "make a lot of money using public office improperly." Does anybody think the reputation of Congress has risen since then?

This is why every now and then some people get enthusiastic about a proposal to reform Congress in some manner, such as denying members of Congress their special perks (like their superb health insurance) and their large salaries, or imposing term limits, or limiting the size of campaign donations, or providing public funds for election campaigns. (I have copied the latest such proposal below.) These reforms are all proposed as a way to make the politicians truly represent ordinary people whom they theoretically represent, rather than serve wealthy special interests or their own greedy selves.

But the problem is bigger than any of these reforms can solve. All of these reforms can be enacted (some already have been) but the problem will remain. The root of the problem is theextreme inequality that puts the real power in society in the hands of billionaires. National politicians cannot win elections without the support of the mass media, which are owned by the upper class plutocracy. This--not salary and benefit perks or any of the other things that the proposed reforms address--is why Congressional politicians serve the upper class instead of ordinary Americans. Their salary and perks are merely a symptom of the problem but not the cause. In fact, plenty of the politicians in Congress are independently wealthy and don’t need their salary or the health coverage perks. Forty-four percent of members of Congress are millionaires.

Very big problems require very big solutions. How do we solve the problem that our society is based on class inequality, one-dollar-one vote? How do we solve the problem that the mass media and all of the other key institutions in our society, including not only the corporations but the schools, labor unions, churches and foundations as well, are owned and controlled by the very wealthy. How do we solve the problem that politicians can only get elected by doing what the very wealthy want them to do?

The big solution that is required is a fundamental social revolution to remove power from the ruling plutocracy and create a society based on equality.

Small solutions like the recent proposed one, copied below, will not solve the big problem:

Congressional Reform Act of 2011 (Amendment 28 of the U.S. Constitution)

1. No Tenure and No Pension. A Congressman collects a salary while in officeand receives no pay when they are out of office.

2. Congress (past, present & future) participates in Social Security. All funds in the Congressional retirement fund move to the Social Security system immediately. All future funds flow into the Social Security system, and Congress participates the same as all other American people. The Social Security fund may not be used for any other purpose.

3. Congress must purchase their own retirement plan, just as all Americans do.

4. Congress will no longer vote themselves a pay raise. Congressional pay will rise by the lower of CPI or 3%.

5. Congress loses their current health care system and participates in the same health care system as the American people.

6. Congress must equally abide by all laws they impose on the American people.

7. All contracts with past and present Congressmen are void effective 1/1/12. The American people did not make this contract with Congressmen. Congressmen made all these contracts with and for themselves. Serving in Congress is an honor, not a career. The Founding Fathers envisioned citizen legislators, so congressmen should serve their terms (no more than 2), then go home and find a job. Former congressmen cannot be lobbiest.

Wednesday, July 20, 2011

Do These Facts Fit Your Paradigm?

Do these facts fit your paradigm?

Fact #1.“Prince Walid bin Talal bin Abdelaziz Al-Saud, the second biggest shareholder in News Corporation after Murdoch, recently gave an interview, on his yacht, to the BBC flagship programme Newsnight. The Saudi prince declared himself "a good friend" of Rupert Murdoch and his son James Murdoch (probably the next executive to be charged by the police in the scandal). He defended both men briskly, but in doing so drew attention to the fact that he is the second biggest shareholder in the Murdoch empire, and that the Murdochs were major shareholders in his own Rotana media empire in the Middle East. An unholy alliance, surely? Mr Murdoch is the co-owner, with Prince Walid, of Fox News - one of the most virulently anti-Muslim television stations in the world. The station gives a megaphone to the likes of Glenn Beck, Bill O'Reilly and Sarah Palin. In the US, Fox's role was to throw gallons of petrol on the flames Islamophobia which were leading to the burning of the Holy Quran by vigilantes.” [http://english.aljazeera.net/indepth/opinion/2011/07/20117181848649939.html]

This fact does not fit into a popular (but wrong) paradigm that says the pro-Israel policy of the United States harms the U.S. ‘national interest’ by angering the oil-rich Arab rulers and making it hard for Big Oil to do business with them. Therefore, according to this “logic,” the only reason the U.S. has a pro-Israel foreign policy is because the Israel Lobby forces Big Oil and the rest of the American plutocracy to be pro-Israel, even though it is against their interest.

But here we see that a Saudi prince is great pals with the most pro-Israel media mogul in the world, and a co-owner with him of Fox News, the #1 pro-Israel network in the U.S.

Fact #2. ““Americans are learning what Europeans have known for years: Islam-bashing wins votes,” wrote journalist Michael Scott Moore in the wake of the 2010 election. His assumption was shared by many then and is still widely accepted today. But as the 2012 campaign ramps up along with the anti-Muslim rhetoric machine, a look back at 2010 turns out to offer quite an unexpected story about the American electorate. In fact, with rare exceptions, “Islam-bashing” proved a strikingly poor campaign tactic. In state after state, candidates who focused on illusory Muslim “threats,” tied ordinary American Muslims to terrorists and radicals, or characterized mosques as halls of triumph (and prayer in them as indoctrination) went down to defeat. Far from winning votes, it could be argued that “Muslim-bashing” alienated large swaths of the electorate -- even as it hardened an already hard core on the right. The fact is that many of the loudest anti-Muslim candidates lost, and for a number of those who won, victory came by the smallest of margins, often driven by forces that went well beyond anti-Muslim rhetoric. A careful look at 2010 election results indicates that Islamophobic talking points can gain attention for a candidate, but the constituency that can be swayed by them remains limited, although not insignificant.” [http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175418/tomgram%3A_stephan_salisbury%2C_how_muslim-bashing_loses_elections/#more]

This fact flies in the face of the paradigm that says most Americans are Islamophobic racists. Fox News, etc., of course, want Americans to believe that all of their fellow Americans are 100% on the War on Terror, anti-Muslim bandwagon. This belief makes those many who are not on the bandwagon afraid to say so publicly. It allows the naked emperor to act as if he were clothed and get away with it. But judging by how people act when alone in a voting booth, it seems Islamophobia is not the majority view.

The paradigm that this fact DOES fit into is the one that says ordinary Americans are an implicitly revolutionary force because their values—equality, solidarity and democracy—are the opposite of the plutocracy’s values of inequality, top-down control and dog-eat-dog competition (for us, not for them).

Fact #3.

The top marginal income tax rate: 100 years at a glance

Presented without comment.

(Originally from the Washington Monthly)

[In case you cannot see this graphic below, it shows that under President Obama’s plan, the wealthiest Americans still pay far less in taxes than under Reagan or Nixon. ]

Does anybody still believe in the paradigm that says President Obama or the Democratic Party is on the side of the middle or lower class, and standing up against the plutocracy?